A line’s determined by two points, so I reckon we’ve found a new trend. His end of Christianity might have come to the Satanic Panic too late for the dancing, but they arrived eventually. So today we welcome Benedict Atkins to the Cult of “Before” Stories!
Last time we met up, we looked at Lydia McGrew’s take on it. She wrote a sort of Argument from Jesus’ Resurrection Totally Happened So Christianity Itself Is Totally True. Among its many flaws, her essay revealed a huge shortcoming in Christians’ thinking. I’ll show you what that shortcoming is–and why it’s such a dealbreaker.
Tonight we had a grand time watching Prodigal Planet (PP), the fourth and last movie in the A Thief in the Night (ATITN) series. So is it going to suck unremittingly? Or will there be a few scenes that are jewels in the dungheap? Come and see.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking that fundagelicals are, at heart, perfectly normal people who have simply been socialized in really awful ways, so they really aren’t aware of the threats they constantly use and the fearmongering behavior they exhibit. I start thinking that they are so immersed in fear tactics that they notice it all about as often as we notice the air in a room or how often we blink. And then A Thief in the Night rolled past my eyes, and I had to come face-to-face with my own boundless misplaced optimism.
It’s been so eye-opening for me to see just how deeply and painfully these movies have affected so many people with their terrifying, traumatizing message. I’ve heard from a great many people over this past week who wanted to share how frightened they’d been by these movies. So we’re going to be looking at why these movies had the effects they did. I’ll start with a retrospective–come join me!
If you wanted to know what 70s Christians thought about the Rapture, these are your movies! Bear in mind that the Christians leading all these churches and Congressional committees and “think tanks” today are the ones who grew up on these movies. These idiotic movies are what informed their opinions about the world. To me, the value they have is that they show me a little of what went into the adult fundagelicals I see grandstanding today.
As horrible as the first A Thief in the Night was, as little happened in it narratively, and as awful as it was according to every single of filmmaking that exists, what blows my mind is that the creators of it found funding for not one–not two–but THREE other sequels.
This is the mega-review of A Thief in the Night, which is one of the big granddaddies of Christian Rapture porn. It’s a movie where nothing happens and none of the characters are distinguishable except by hairstyle, and yet somehow it traumatized millions and millions of Christians in the 1970s and Read more
It sure looks like it follows all the usual tropes of these sorts of movies. Blah blah, Christians get Raptured and the world falls apart. Blah blah, one world government. Blah blah, everyone forgets about human rights–which fundagelicals are not super-good with anyway, remember–and the ebil gubmint starts executing people for holding beliefs they don’t like–which Christian leaders have traditionally done for centuries and only stopped doing because of human rights advances.
When it comes to fundagelical Christianity, few things make as little sense to outsiders to that culture as its collective near-obsession with all things Judaism. I’m going to start the party off by showing you the bizarre doctrinal belief of supersessionism, which explains why Christians have such a love-hate relationship with Judaism generally.